Chief Leader – June 30, 2015
by RICHARD STEIER
If you believed the unhappy whispers triggered by the failure of the bill equalizing disability-pension rights for cops and firefighters hired after 2009 to get approval in Albany last week, the one lesson Mayor de Blasio learned from decision-makers in the state capital was the small satisfactions of spiteful sabotage.
They contended that he acted not out of concern about the potential cost of the bill, as he maintained, but because he still hadn’t forgiven Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch for embarrassing him in the wake of the murders of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos on a Brooklyn street last Dec. 20 by turning his back on the Mayor along with other cops who were at Woodhull Hospital when Mr. de Blasio arrived to comfort the officers’ families, then declaring that he had “blood on [his] hands.” The back-turning was repeated by hundreds of officers at the two funerals, and while there was no evidence Mr. Lynch orchestrated those less-spontaneous displays, neither were there any indications he sought to discourage them, even after Police Commissioner Bill Bratton did so prior to the second funeral.
‘Wanted to Get Him Back’ “De Blasio had a hard-on for Pat Lynch—he wanted to get him back,” someone involved in the discussions on the bill said June 23, once it became obvious the version favored by the PBA and the Uniformed Firefighters Association would not be acted on at the close of the legislative session.
“I heard that, too,” State Sen. Diane Savino said. “There’s probably some truth in it. There’s no love lost between the two of them.”
Mr. Lynch through a spokesman declined to comment on both the payback angle and the failure of the union-backed bill to advance.
UFA President Steve Cassidy was somewhat reserved in his comments, saying he was “very disappointed by the outcome of this long fight that the UFA has led on behalf of more than 1,400 of the FDNY’s newest firefighters.” Some of his anger crept through, however, in the closing line of his statement, when he declared, “What remains true is that newer firefighters permanently disabled in the line of duty will be forced to survive in one of America’s most expensive cities on a disgraceful $27 per day.”
Mr. de Blasio stated his opposition to that effort to give post-2009 hires as cops and firefighters the same allowance equal to 75 percent of final average salary, tax-free that would go to more-senior colleagues who suffered disabling line-of-duty injuries on the grounds that it would be too costly. His Budget Director, Dean Fuleihan, had told the City Council in early June that the bill would be nearly four times as expensive in its first four years as the alternative measure the de Blasio administration succeeded in moving through the Council as a home-rule message to Albany.
The Mayor’s bill didn’t move in either house of the Legislature, but its being the only home-rule supplied by the Council on the issue was enough to keep the union-favored bill from being passed in the Assembly.
No Trade for ‘Minimum’
That happened to be perhaps the only significant victory Mr. de Blasio gained last week. The importance attached to it can be gauged by the fact that he balked when Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan offered to support a major increase in the state’s minimum wage—from the current $8.75 an hour to $11.50—in return for the Mayor’s support of the union-favored disability bill.
Maybe Mr. de Blasio thought the strain upon the city’s budget would be too great over the long term; maybe he believed that the push for a boost in the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $15 an hour would soon bear fruit, rather than turning overripe with time. Ms. Savino said he appeared skeptical the wage hike wouldn’t encounter a last-minute hurdle as it moved toward approval.
Or maybe he was still smarting over Mr. Flanagan’s refusal to go along with more than a one-year extension of mayoral control of the city’s schools despite his own willingness to modify his demand from a permanent approval to a three-year extension.
The hardball tactics of the Republican majority in the Senate were prompted by lingering antipathy toward the Mayor for his failed attempt to swing control of that body to the Democrats in last November’s elections. GOP Senators’ unhappiness with his move was understandable, their outrage less so, since a Democratic Mayor who found himself thwarted in Albany last year certainly had reason to want a change in Senate make-up. If anyone had a right to feel betrayed, it was the Mayor toward Governor Cuomo, since he got him the Working Families Party’s endorsement last spring in return for a pledge that he would join the effort to bring a Democratic majority to the Senate. Mr. Cuomo conspicuously failed to honor his promise, maybe as a way of stating that nobody puts Andy in a corner, maybe because he had doubts that the effort would succeed even with his participation and concluded there was no point having to share the GOP hostility with Mr. de Blasio when he could deflect it all onto his political baby brother.
Took It Too Far
Taking their anger with the Mayor all the way to the end on school control seemed excessive on the part of Senate Republicans; they could have made their point and at the last minute agreed to a three-year extension, which was still giving him a short leash considering that Michael Bloomberg was handed a seven-year lease on the concept early in his administration and then benefited from most of the six-year extension that followed. The fact that Mr. Bloomberg contributed millions of dollars over the years to Senate Republican campaign committees to help them maintain or regain their majorities in the upper house of the Legislature probably didn’t hurt.
The ostensible reason for making Mr. de Blasio come back seeking another extension next spring is to prevent him from leading a charge for a Democratic majority again. Given his lack of success last year, however, a case could be made that despite Republicans’ concerns about a different kind of turnout in a presidential election year, they might actually benefit from having the Mayor campaigning against them in battleground districts.
That didn’t make it any less painful for him to endure having the legs cut out from under what is the heart of the school-control law: that a Mayor is given that power in an attempt to produce accountability, starting with him and making its way down through the system.
No Help From Cuomo
The static he encountered, and the unwillingness of the Governor—whose close ties to the Nassau County Republican Party played a role in the selection of Mr. Flanagan to step in when fellow Nassau Senator Dean Skelos was bounced as Majority Leader earlier this spring after being arrested on corruption charges—to exert his authority to secure him the three-year extension, had to sting. Throw in an expansion of the number of charter schools in the city even though legislators did not raise the charter cap, the thwarting of Mr. de Blasio’s bid to end vacancy decontrol as part of an extension of the rent-control laws and his unsuccessful bid to expand the 421-a tax-abatement program to aid his affordable-housing initiative, and it amounted to a full-fledged Albany hosing.
He couldn’t be blamed for wondering if Norman Mailer had the right idea when he campaigned for Mayor in 1969 on the promise that if elected he would have the city secede and become the 51st state. But since that’s just one more initiative Mr. de Blasio has no prayer of getting approved in Albany, it might be time to take a long, introspective look at what’s gone wrong for him once he gets beyond The Bronx and heads up the Thruway.
“I think all government is about making alliances,” said political consultant George Arzt, a former Press Secretary to Mayor Ed Koch. “You need those alliances to get the aid and legislative help the city wants.”
Damaged Mended Fences
He was asked whether Mr. de Blasio made a tactical error in opposing the pension-disability equalization sought by the police and fire unions, particularly when it was supported strongly not only by the Senate but by Mr. Cuomo, who until now was known primarily for slashing pension benefits for public employees. The Mayor had been praised by some police-union leaders for taking steps in the aftermath of the murder of the two cops six months earlier to make clear his support of the cops, yet he undercut that work in the tactical maneuvering that headed off what both Mr. Lynch and Mr. Cassidy regarded as a motherhood issue.
Mr. Arzt didn’t directly address how it affected the Mayor’s relationship with the two union leaders, but seemed to do so by inference in saying, “You can’t alienate either legislative body or the Governor. You can work the back rooms and work out compromises behind the scenes and say ‘this is what we wanted’ once the deal is made. I think there are many cases where he comes out with a pronouncement and says this is done without consulting any of the powers that be.”
Mr. Cassidy had complained about the lack of discussions City Hall engaged in on the disability bill. He claimed that even near the end of the legislative session, with concern rising in the administration that the union measure might prevail after Mr. Cuomo joined a rally on its behalf, a meeting called by the Mayor had bogged down in his insistence that his alternative proposal satisfied the needs of the affected employees.
Didn’t Go Far Enough
That measure would have ended the scenario under which less-senior disabled cops and firefighters could have wound up with the low-end payment that the union leaders had decried for the past 18 months. It would have ended the Social Security offset under Tier 3 for the post-2009 hires and ensured them of a basic allowance of at least 50 percent of the maximum salary for each job, bringing the annual payout to close to $40,000 regardless of years of service. But it would also have restricted the 75-percent-of-final-average-salary allowance to those whose injuries or illnesses had also qualified them for Social Security disability benefits.
The two union leaders believed they had done sufficient compromising when, beginning last year, they focused their efforts strictly on obtaining the Tier 2 disability benefit that cops and firefighters were entitled to up through 2009, when then-Gov. David Paterson declined to extend full Tier 2 status to cops and firefighters, as had been done since Tier 3 supplanted it for other city and state workers in mid-1976.
The unions over the years have either negotiated or accepted through arbitration changes that created less-generous salary scales for new hires; even the Tier 2 pension system, which was adopted in Albany over unions’ vociferous objections, is in some respects less generous than Tier 1, which it replaced for those hired beginning on July 1, 1973.
Where They Drew Line
But they believe the disability provision should not discriminate against those hired later, a position supported by Mr. Paterson himself, who has said that he regretted that aspect of his veto six years ago. Mr. Cassidy pointed out during the verbal skirmishing on the issue that the lesser benefit kicked in at a time when the predominantly white firefighting force was being dramatically altered by a Federal court ruling that found the longtime hiring exam had discriminated against black candidates, meaning that more than 40 percent of those post-2009 hires being placed at a disadvantage under the Tier 3 benefit have been minorities.
The unions don’t believe that cost was the deciding issue for Mr. de Blasio. Mr. Lynch questioned the Mayor’s priorities in noting his willingness to make a $41-million settlement with the Central Park Five—nearly three times what city lawyers had previously recommended the ceiling should be—while calling that payout “a moral obligation,” yet felt no similar compunction on behalf of first-responders seriously injured while serving the city. And Mr. Cassidy contended the Mayor was willing to spend freely on what he deemed “progressive” causes yet tightened the budget reins when it came to compensating employees of two workforces that have traditionally been more conservative in their political leanings.
If continued hard feelings toward Mr. Lynch played any role in Mr. de Blasio’s opposition to the bill—and the kind of energetic, hardball lobbying at both the Council and in Albany that is usually associated more with Mr. Cuomo than the Mayor—his timing would seem questionable. It was one thing to take a hard line against the union-backed bill at a time when Mr. Lynch was facing his first election challenge in 12 years a month ago: there was sound political gamesmanship in not doing anything that would ease his run. Once Mr. Lynch gained re-election, however, pulling a surprising 70 percent of the vote against two opponents, the political value of denying his newer members the benefit shrank dramatically for Mr. de Blasio, since the PBA leader’s new term will not expire until June 2019, or 19 months after the Mayor’s own re-election run.
‘Don’t Bank on Logic’
“You’re assuming that they think this through to a logical conclusion,” said Senator Savino, a liberal Democrat who represents a fairly conservative district covering a big piece of Staten Island and a small slice of western Brooklyn.
Mr. de Blasio sometimes seems convinced that problems the polls show he has connecting with white voters—only about one-third of whom approve of the job he is doing—can be overcome just as long as he maintains strong support among minority residents, particularly in the black community. Such confidence would appear misplaced considering that his first boss at City Hall, Mayor Dinkins, ended a string of successes throughout the nation for African-American Mayors seeking re-election to a second term because his support among whites eroded after his 1989 victory and the black turnout in his 1993 rematch with Rudy Giuliani was smaller than in their previous contest.
‘Can’t Govern That Way’
Ms. Savino, echoing a criticism others have made about his approach to governing, said, “You can’t run City Hall like it’s a political campaign. And that’s something that’s gonna have to change. They’re comfortable with the thought that they’re on the side of the angels, and sooner or later everyone’s gonna see it.”
Such perceptions are not reinforced, however, among the larger voting public—including those who share the Mayor’s progressive views on key issues—by the kind of stand he took against the disability-pension bill. At their best, Mayors garner broad support by doing what seems to be in the public interest without regard to whether the people benefiting are part of their voting base.
This bill offered him the chance to find common ground not only with two unions that are outside his electoral comfort zone but with a Governor and Senate Majority Leader he is likely to be butting heads with again in the future. Instead of banking some good will and getting credit for doing the right thing even though it didn’t play to his base, he opted to hunker down and give them one more reason to resent him.
Undercut Closest Allies
The New York Times June 25 noted another mayoral miscalculation that hurt his prospects in Albany: his 421-a deal with the Real Estate Board of New York to expand developers’ tax break in return for building more affordable housing. Assembly Democrats, his most-reliable allies in Albany, the Times noted, believed this undermined their bargaining position in getting the State Senate—which depends strongly on campaign support from the industry—to agree to changes in the rent-regulation laws that would benefit tenants. The story quoted Democratic State Sen. James Sanders of Queens saying that such a trade-off “was your only card” to play in gaining such an agreement.
Instead, the Mayor gained nothing on rent regulation and got saddled with a condition that he objected to which could benefit the Governor: the 421-a program has been extended for six months, with the changes sought by Mr. de Blasio to take effect for four years if, in the interim, the real-estate industry can agree on a deal with the building-trades unions to pay prevailing wages to employees hired for those projects. The Mayor had balked at the prevailing-wage aspect, arguing it would make the deal less attractive to developers, allowing the Governor, who as his popularity has dwindled has sought to firm up alliances with his union allies, to seem more pro-employee than Mr. de Blasio.
‘Not a New Story’
Ms. Savino said a certain amount of frustration with the state’s Byzantine political ways could be expected for any Mayor, even if the Governor was less of a Type A personality than Mr. Cuomo, remarking, “A Mayor getting his ass kicked in Albany is not a new story.”
But a union official who is not a fan of Mr. de Blasio but not an implacable critic, either, remarked, “Not that the Mayor is the brightest political strategist that we’ve ever seen.”
You would think that each trip he makes to Albany offers Mr. de Blasio a refresher course on that subject.
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